Governor Kay Ivey says she is concerned about the the Biden-Harris Administration’s Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV) parole program and how it will continue to impact Alabama.
The Biden-Harris administration first launched the sponsorship program in October 2022 for Venezuelans hoping they wouldn’t travel to the border. It was then expanded in January 2023 to include migrants from Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua.
Ivey on Tuesday led a letter, with 24 other governors, to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on the issue.
“The impact of this ‘parole’ program has been the sudden influx of foreign nationals throughout our states and communities,” wrote the governors. “The unexplainable lack of any communication from your Administration over arrival times, duration of residency, legal status, and location of these ‘parolees’ has created considerable confusion and alarm among local officials and the general public. In the absence of direction from DHS, law enforcement and municipal leaders have often been left to rely upon news reports and social media posts to determine size and location of incoming migrant populations in order to assess what impact they may have on already limited government services including local public schools.”
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According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as of the end of August, 530,000 migrants from these four countries had flown into the U.S. under the policy.
“As chief executives of our states directly responsible for the safety of our citizens and those who reside within our borders, we require a full accounting from the Biden-Harris Administration and DHS of the location and legal status of the parolee populations in our states,” Ivey’s letter continues.
“We further require information about the ‘robust security vetting’ DHS claims to have undertaken on each parolee, and we ask for the names and locations of the sponsors who have been granted guardianship over parolees. We also ask what system DHS has in place to monitor migrants and their sponsors and what assistance DHS is providing migrants.”
DHS announced Friday that they will not be extending the legal status of hundreds of thousands of migrants who were allowed to fly to the U.S. under a sponsorship program.
“Due to the Biden-Harris Administration’s CHNV program’s policy of placing hundreds of
thousands of migrants in our states,” the letter reads, “and potentially in need of state and local services, our states have unwittingly been placed a support role without our consent, any advance notice or resources. Accordingly, we request your administration furnish our states complete information about the location and status of migrants being directed to our communities.”
Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee
